Thank goodness that Michael has now steered us back to the matter of social and economic justice, which one wishes that some of those who have been on about the HHS mandate might also concern themselves with.
Quite a bit of what I do in my 'other' life as a scholar of domestic and international economic law is try to figure out ways in which we might improve local and global economic arrangements in manners that might render them more just. And as Michael's post reminds us, one of the principal sources of economic injustice, at least within the 'developed' world, is the way in which trade liberalization has been used to 'undo' many of the gains made by labor, through heroic struggle, in the 'developed' economies over the course of the 20th century.
A dilemma presented by trade liberalization to those of us who are concerned about this form of injustice, however, is that it has in some wahys improved the lot of many of those in the developing world who once lived in conditions far more wretched even than they are now. How, then, to regard this - and better yet, to deal with it?
How, that is, might we preserve and indeed intensify the justice gains being made in the developing world, withoug sacrificing such of those gains as have been made in the developed world?
I think the key lies in conditioning trade liberalization upon the gainers' - that is, the firm-owners' - sharing their gains with labor, by conveying shares in the benefitting enterprises to them.
Here is one way we might do so, which I would love to get some of our readers' reactions to.
Many thanks and much more to come on all of this.
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